Sex is not the enemy

<My stocking is hung! Please link me to yours if you did fannish stocking too; I would love to write for my friends.

If you signed up for the flist exchange that I hosted, this is a friendly reminder that your fics are due in two-ish weeks, on December 28. Whether or not you signed up for the exchange, you are welcome to write treats. Click here if you'd like to peruse the requests. There's a lot of MCU/Agents of SHIELD, and a little bit of HP and Buffy.

In today's writing news, I finished a draft of the story for the exchange I'm hosting, so that's good. It's good enough to be gifted in its present form, though I'm hoping to keep polishing it over the next two weeks. I also finished a draft of the 13,000 word story about Logan Echolls that I've been writing since last March. Given my current pace, it's probably going to take a few more weeks to edit, but it felt good to take a step toward marking it off my WIP list.

In today's December meme, rubynye asked me about cooking with alcohol. This is not a topic I have particularly strong opinions about, though I do find alcohol to be a pretty useful ingredient. Mushrooms are my favorite food, and my favorite method of preparing them -- quartering and sauteeing them in butter -- never tastes right unless it's finished with a splash of sherry. My favorite sherry for cooking is Pedro Ximinez Olorso Sherry, which tastes good enough for drinking a la carte but only costs about $10. Other than finishing off mushrooms, the best use of alcohol is to cook with a bit of the wine you plan to drink with dinner. It makes the wine pairing so much more harmonious, even if they're not too things that should fit together. For example, sweet riesling should not taste particularly good with cream of mushroom soup, but when I sauteed my shitakes in it, the two went together really well. Tonight, I made hanger steak with red wine sauce and mushrooms, and it was quite delicious. The sauce was a real stand-out, and I poured the leftovers on my leek and blue cheese toasts.

YAY for your exchange. I started on my story a while ago but had to stop to do my be_compromised Secret Santa -- here's to staggered deadlines. But I can't wait to get back to it. Been writing a bit too much angst and drama lately, and it's time to go for irresponsible irrepressible fun.

I'd love to hang a fandom stocking but (a) I don't really know how and (b) if I did then I'd feel obliged to go and fill everyone's that I know, and I just don't have the time. :-( May pop the occasional lump of coal into one or the other though ...